Thomas Toone

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Thomas Toone (1705–1755), an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth and death in colonial Virginia, his parentage by Mark Tune, his marriage to Anne Magdalene Harris, and his son Travis Tune. Notable: among the early colonial Virginia ancestors in the Hyten line, with the family surname appearing in variant forms as Toone, Tune, and Tone.

Thomas Toone (1705–1755) belonged to the early colonial generations of the Hyten family's paternal-grandfather line, standing as an eighth-great-grandparent of the compiler. He was born in 1705 in Richmond, within what is now Wise County, Virginia, and he closed his life in the same locale on the twentieth day of May 1755, while Virginia yet remained a colony of the British Crown. His span of fifty years was thus passed entirely beneath colonial governance, two full decades before the stirrings of American independence.

He was the son of Mark Tune (1667–1718), whose own life had bridged the latter Stuart era and the early Hanoverian period of the English-speaking Atlantic world. The variant spellings of the surname — Toone, Tune, and Tone — were characteristic of the age, when orthography in parish registers, deeds, and probate papers was guided more by the ear of the clerk than by any fixed convention. Such variation across a single household was unremarkable in the colonial South.

Thomas married Anne Magdalene Harris, whose given names suggest the broad Anglo-Protestant naming customs prevalent among Virginia's settler families. Of their union there is recorded a son, James Traverse — known also as Travenor and familiarly as Travis — Tune, born in 1731 and living to the remarkable age of ninety-four, dying in 1825. Through this son the line descended toward the later Tune and allied families who would, in time, intermarry with the broader Hyten kindred.

Virginia in the first half of the eighteenth century was a colony of tobacco, of expanding county courts, and of a steady westward press of settlement from the Tidewater toward the Piedmont and the mountain frontier. Families such as Thomas Toone's, planted in the interior, formed part of that gradual movement of English-descended colonists into the upland regions.

Thomas was the compiler's eighth-great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.